WASHINGTON, March 31 (Xinhua) -- The number of COVID-19 deaths could have been "decreased substantially" if the Trump administration had acted more forcefully to mitigate the pandemic, Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus task force coordinator, said in a CNN documentary.
If cities and states across the country had aggressively applied the lessons of the first surge toward mitigation last spring, potentially preventing the surges that followed, Birx said in the documentary released by CNN on Sunday.
"I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge," Birx said. "All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
The United States remains the nation worst hit by the pandemic, with the world's highest caseload and death toll, accounting for more than 23 percent of global cases and nearly 20 percent of global deaths.
As of Tuesday, U.S. COVID-19 deaths surpassed 550,000, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. Enditem